Thursday, 5 April 2012

Here are a few success stories, each of which has a dollar value figure assigned.

Tom Lan, Senior Operations Support Engineer, Production Support
of ConocoPhillips China (COPC), cites a good example of
knowledge sharing (KS) that took place early January 2005. Tom
needed a simulation model to calculate the pressure drop on the
subsea pipeline at Bohai Phase 1 and organized a site visit by Larry
Harms, Staff Production Optimization Engineer at the US Lower 48
& Latin America business unit. By sharing software, Larry and Tom
were able to create a simulation model at a net saving US$19,600
for the company.

In another story, Jerry Liu, Senior Buyer of Tanggu Operations,
COPC, was preparing to order 7 5/8" 13 Cr casing for an upcoming
drilling program. The quoted prices for this material seemed
excessive, so contacts were made with Global Procurement who
suggested checking with Australia for market intelligence. Changes
to the Australian program had resulted in some of their material being
surplus and available at a much lower price. 4,431 meters of pipe
were then transferred from Australia to China. The China BU saved
approximately US$526,000. An additional benefit may be claimed
by the Australian BU as they were able to dispose of excess material.

Brendan O'Reilly, Senior Explorationist, Exploration Department,
COPC, gave an example of how knowledge
was shared from various BU's overseas to the
China BU, saving the company US$10 million
in drilling costs. The China BU Exploration
Team called upon this expertise from Vietnam,
Indonesia and two groups in Houston to peer
review the geoscience and engineering
aspects of the PL 9-1 Buried Hill Field that
was discovered in 2000. The peer team reviewed
the results of the discovery well, the
geological, geophysical interpretation, the
resulting geological model and the different
play types and recommended that the China
BU focus on a southern Carbonate Play that
may provide the best opportunity to achieve
economic success on the project. The peer
team also recommended that an expensive
deeper well (costing US$10 million) not be
proposed until more well information is
acquired.

Carl Cheng, Production Engineer, Production Engineering
Department of COPC, gave an excellent example of applied KS
centered around a developing technology. The China BU was
recommended by UT to field-trial the Multi-Phase Meter (MPM) as
an alternative well testing method (as compared to the conventional
test separator method). During the six month testing phase in Bohai
field, a number of comparison tests were conducted between the
two with the guidelines established by a Flow & Metering expert at
UT. Based on UT's recommendation, COPC purchased this unit of
locally-made MPM last year and switched fully to MPM for all daily
well testing in Bohai field as of November 2004. Experience from PL
19-3 Phase I operation shows that the MPM results were overall more
consistent than the test Separator results. This has made production
allocation more accurate as well performance is evaluated. Moreover,
MPM has cut the well testing time by half from 4 hours to 2 hours
with improved metering accuracy. It is projected that from
November 2004 to the end of 2005, the revenue from the resulted
incremental production could reach approximately US$147,000.

2 comments:

Hi Nick, I would be interested in your views on what role KM may have played or should have played with the recent 2011 oil spill incident in the Bohai Sea? some say they are not learning the lessons of previous pipeline explosions? http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2011/jul/07/china-oil-spill-cover-up-bohai-sea